To U.S. investors, buying a piece of a toll road company in one of China’s fastest-growing provinces might have seemed like a pretty safe bet.

But the twists and turns at China Infrastructure Investment Ltd. (Pink Sheets: CIIC) have taken the company from the Nasdaq to the Pink Sheets and wiped out much of its market capitalization, which once topped $400 million.

A Sharesleuth investigation found that certain undisclosed parties profited handsomely from the reverse merger that brought the company public, by buying 21.9 million shares from the former chief executive of the U.S. shell it combined with.

The sale price translates to less than 0.4 cents a share. At the time, the company’s stock was trading on the open market for more than $4.

Whoever got Hall’s stock appears to have resold much of it during periodic surges in trading volume in 2009 and 2010. Based on China Infrastructure Investment’s share prices in those periods, it’s possible that the seller or sellers could have collected $20 million or more.

Our investigation also found that the holding company that owned a majority stake in China Infrastructure Investment at the time it went public might have ended up with some of Hall’s stock.

SEC filings show that the holding company boosted its stake by more than 13 million shares over a two-year period, without disclosing any changes in its ownership, as required under federal securities law.

In the spring of 2005, a publicly held dating business called Universal Flirts Inc. gave up on love and did a reverse merger with a Chinese cell phone maker.

According to Securities and Exchange Commission filings, founder Darrell C. Lerner walked away with a 26 percent stake in the Chinese company, Orsus Xelent Technologies Inc. (formerly AMEX: ORS, now Pink Sheets: ORSX). By 2007, Lerner no longer was listed among its top stockholders, even though he never reported selling any of his 7.7 million shares and could not have liquidated large amounts on the open market because of a lack of trading volume.

When Orsus Xelent’s stock surged in the fall of that year — on a wave of publicity about big phone orders that never materialized — whoever held those shares might have been able to sell them for $20 million or more.

A Sharesleuth investigation found similar discrepancies in the reported share ownership of six other Chinese companies that a low-profile promoter named S. Paul Kelley helped to bring public in the United States between 2005 and 2009.

Our analysis of SEC filings found that tens of millions of shares allocated to the chief executives of the shell companies used in those mergers essentially disappeared – sold or transferred to other parties with little or no disclosure. Under U.S. securities laws, anyone owning 5 percent or more of a company’s stock must report significant changes in their holdings within 10 days of the transaction.

Based on share prices and trading volumes, we calculated that the people who wound up with the missing shares in the other six Chinese companies might have sold them for upwards of $50 million.

That total includes:

Shares of New Oriental Energy & Chemical Corp. (Formerly Nasdq: NOEC; now Pink Sheets: NOEC) that could have been sold for $8 million when that company’s stock price and trading volume were at their highest levels.

Our analysis of SEC filings found that the people behind the shell companies used in the mergers used stock splits and other maneuvers to put millions of additional shares into the hands of unknown parties.

We believe the recipients of those shares could have sold them for a further $80 million.

In other words, the architects of the reverse mergers and their associates might have reaped $150 million from the deals — and possibly much more.

It appears that the SEC employees who review proxy filings and other submissions for compliance with disclosure rules did not notice the discrepancies in the reported share ownership at Orsus Xelent, Kandi and the other Chinese companies.